### Please describe the problem.

I recently switched a large (~6TiB) video repository from "normal" to "unlocked" mode, mainly because some external tool was getting confused by symlinks.

As a result, all remotes related to that repositories have this painful, multi-hour process by which they convert their work tree to follow the new layout. That, in itself, is disturbingly slow, with little progress shown to the user. In fact, I often fear that git-annex is messing up and actually adding files as git blobs itself, which makes me interrupt it and start over again, which, obviously, makes things much worse.

But there are other weird things. At the moment, I'm copying files from my laptop with:

    git annex copy --from angela -J2

Being worried about the lack of progress, I interrupted it and ran instead:

    git annex copy --from angela -J2 --not --in here --in angela

That command generated zero output for 12 minutes straight. Looking at strace, it seemed to have read a large number of files in `.git/annex/objects`, which is slow.

Another example is, after the above command completed, i ran `git annex sync -g`, which i expected to take a handful of seconds, but the first line was a `commit` that took nearly a minute.

### What steps will reproduce the problem?

It's not quite clear to me how to reproduce this from scratch. I guess convert an existing large repo?

### What version of git-annex are you using? On what operating system?

10.20230802-1~bpo12+1 on debian bookworm.

### Please provide any additional information below.

Not sure what could help here. Maybe having more feedback on what's actually happening in those minutes-long stretches would help. Git, for example, has a percentage/object count thing that pops up when things like `git status` take too long. I would love to see something similar here.

Also, I understand the [[todo/git_smudge_clean_interface_suboptiomal]] problem, and this might just be a specific manifestation of it. It still seems to me having some feedback, if even around the git filter boundaries, would alleviate some of those problems.

### Have you had any luck using git-annex before? (Sometimes we get tired of reading bug reports all day and a lil' positive end note does wonders)

I use git-annex daily, and it's a lifesaver. :)
